Deployment techniques are available to produce an image file on an information processing apparatus such as a personal computer (PC), and deploy the image file on another information apparatus via a network using a deployment server.
FIG. 16 illustrates an image file deployment method of related art. A system 100 includes a deployment server 200 and information processing apparatuses 300. The deployment server 200 directly deploys on each information processing apparatus 300 an image stored on an external or internal storage device (not illustrated) via multicast communication or unicast communication.
If the image is concurrently deployed on a large number of information processing apparatuses, the multicast communication is used to reduce the workload on the network.
If the deployment server concurrently deploys the image file on a large number of information processing apparatuses, the workload carried by the deployment server to manage the information processing apparatuses and the network workload increase. Time to deploy the image file increases as the number of information processing apparatuses increases.
If the image file suffers from a lack of data, even if partially, the information processing apparatus having received the image file has difficulty in using the image file. The image file is thus reliably distributed, and if data is missing, the missing data should be recovered.
In the retransmission control of the multicast communication, the deployment server typically employs a technique of verifying a reception notification of a packet from each information processing apparatus as a deployment destination. If at least one of the PCs as the deployment destinations suffers from data missing such as a packet loss in accordance with the technique, retransmission is performed via multicast communication. If the retransmission control frequently occurs during the deployment of the image file, time to complete the image deployment increases.
The retransmission control and the workload carried by the deployment server to manage a large number of information processing apparatuses at a time cause an increase in the time to deploy the image file as the number of information processing apparatuses increases.